The best known attempt to link prejudice to a particular personality type was provided by Adorno and colleagues (1950). This theory – a unique blend of Marxist social philosophy, Freudian analysis of family dynamics, and quantitative psychometrics – quickly established itself as a reference point for a whole generation of researchers into the nature of prejudice.
Its basic hypothesis was simple: an individual’s political and social attitudes cohere together and are ‘an expression of deep lying trends in personality’ (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 1). Prejudiced people are those whose personalities render them susceptible to those racist or fascist ideas prevalent in a society at a given time. The theory did not try to explain the origins of those ideas at a societal level; this, asserted its authors, was a problem for sociological or political analysis. Rather, they were concerned to account for individual differences in receptivity to those ideas.
According to Adorno and his team, these personality differences can be traced to the family in which the child is socialized. Much influenced by Freudian thinking, these researchers believed that the child’s development involves the constraints of social existence. The earliest and most powerful agents of this socialization process are, of course, the parents, and in the ‘normal’ case they strike a balance between allowing the child some self-expression – for example tolerating occasional outbursts of temper or exuberance – and imposing some flexible limits of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. The problem with prejudiced people, argued Adorno and his colleagues, was that they had been exposed to a family regime which was overly concerned with ‘good behaviour’ and conformity to conventional moral codes. The parents in such families – especially the fathers – used excessively harsh disciplinary measures to punish the child’s transgressions. As a result – or so Adorno and his colleagues believed – the child’s aggression towards the parents (which is an inevi-table effect of its ‘natural’ urges being frustrated) is displaced away from them, because of anxiety about the consequences of displaying it so directly, and onto substitute targets. The most likely choice of scapegoats would be those seen as weaker or inferior to oneself – for example anyone who deviated from the societal norm. Ready candidates for this cathartic release of aggression were thought to include members of minority ethnic groups or of other socially devalued categories such as homosexuals or convicted criminals.
Adorno and his colleagues proposed that this syndrome was not just reflected in the content of the person’s social attitudes; it also manifested itself in the cognitive style in which those attitudes were constructed and expressed. They believed that, on account of the parents’ disciplinary zeal and strictly conventional morality, the child develops a simplistic way of thinking about the world in which people and their actions are rigidly categorized into ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. This tendency was thought
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Prejudiced Individuals 15 to generalize into a cognitive style which is marked by the consistent use of very clearly demarcated categories and by intolerance to any ‘fuzziness’ between them. Of course, such a way of thinking also readily lends itself to the endorsement of distinc-tive and immutable stereotypes about social groups.
The end result, then, is a person who is over-deferential and anxious towards authority figures (since these symbolize the parents), who sees the world – often liter-ally – in black and white, being unable or unwilling to tolerate cognitive ambiguity, and who is overtly hostile to anyone who is not obviously an ingroup member. Adorno and his colleagues called this type of person the authoritarian personality, and the author or authors of the leaflet with which we began this chapter would constitute an excellent example of just such a type. The combination of crudely anti-black, anti-Semitic and anti-communist invective, laced with undercurrents of sexual violence and fear of powerful conspiracies, is precisely the kind of constellation of attitudes which the prototypical authoritarian is thought to endorse.
To substantiate their theory, Adorno and his colleagues initiated a huge research project, which combined large-scale psychometric testing and individual clinical inter-views. The psychometric work was initially concerned with designing some objective measures of various forms of overt prejudice (for example anti-Semitism, or general ethnocentrism). This then evolved into the construction of a personality inventory which, it was hoped, would tap into the central aspects of the underlying authoritarian personality syndrome. This measure, the most famous to emerge from the project, they called the ‘F-scale’, so labelled because it was intended to measure ‘pre-fascist tenden-cies’. It consisted of thirty items which, after a careful process of screening and pre-testing, were all designed to reflect various aspects of the authoritarian person’s hypothesized make-up. For example there were questions concerned with authoritarian submission (‘obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn’), with aggression towards deviant groups (‘homosexuals are hardly better than criminals and ought to be severely punished’), and with the projection of uncon-scious, especially sexual, impulses (‘the wild sex life of the Greeks and Romans was tame compared to some of the goings-on in this country, even in places where people might least expect it’). The scale had good internal reliability and, just as its authors had predicted, it correlated well with their previous measures of intergroup prejudice, despite the fact that it contained no items specifically referring to ethnic groups.
In an attempt to validate the F-scale, small sub-samples of very high and very low scorers on it were selected for intensive clinical interviews. These consisted of detailed questioning of the respondents’ recollection of their early childhood experiences, of their perceptions of their parents, and of their views on various social and moral issues of the day. These interviews did seem to confirm many of Adorno and his team’s theo-retical suppositions about the origins and consequences of authoritarianism. For instance high scorers on the F-scale tended to idealize their parents as complete para-gons of virtue. At the same time they recalled their childhood as a time of strict obedi-ence to parental authority, with harsh sanctions for any minor misdemeanours. Their current attitudes corresponded well to their answers on the F-scale items: very moralis-tic, openly condemnatory of ‘deviants’ or social ‘inferiors’, and exhibiting sharply defined categorical stereotypes, often openly prejudiced. The low scorers, by contrast, painted a more equivocal and balanced picture of their early family life and typically presented a more complex and flexible set of social attitudes.
Whether due to the ambitiousness of its theoretical and applied goals or to the range of methodologies it employed, The Authoritarian Personality excited much interest amongst social psychologists in the 1950s. A review article which appeared just eight years after its appearance cited over 200 published studies investigating correlates of authoritarianism with such psychological phenomena as leadership, impression formation, problem solving, social acquiescence, psychopathology, cogni-tive style and, of course, prejudice (Christie and Cook, 1958).
It is the latter two topics that are of interest to us here. What independent empirical support is there for Adorno and colleagues’ hypothesis that the authoritarian is charac-terized by an over-rigid cognitive style, which does not easily accommodate ambiguities and equivocation and which, when translated into social attitudes, shows as hostility towards minority groups?
One of the earliest experiments designed to examine the association between authoritarianism and mental rigidity was carried out by Rokeach (1948). His technique was to present participants with a series of simple arithmetic problems. In the practice trials these problems required at least three separate operations for their solution.
However, in the test trials, the problems, although superficially similar to those presented in the practice sessions, could be solved by a simpler, one-step procedure – in addition to the previously rehearsed longer solution. The key question was whether participants would solve these subsequent problems by the faster method or whether they would persevere rigidly with the less direct technique they had learned in prac-tice. Rokeach also measured their ethnocentrism, which normally correlates well with authoritarianism. Just as he (and Adorno and colleagues) had hypothesized, those who scored highly (that is, above the median) on ethnocentrism showed consistently a higher mental rigidity than those who scored below the median. However, after several unsuccessful attempts to replicate these findings, Brown (1953) concluded that the link between authoritarianism and rigidity only emerged when the testing situation was important for participants. By experimentally manipulating the pre-sumed social, scientific and personal significance of the arithmetic problems, Brown found a clear-cut association between authoritarianism and rigidity only in the ‘ego-involving’ conditions, and not in the ‘non-involved’ group.
These studies were early forerunners to many others, which were to investigate the correlations between authoritarian or right-wing attitudes and cognitive styles. Jost and colleagues (2003a) identified over eighty such studies and concluded that, indeed, people with authoritarian attitudes did seem to display particular ways of thinking. In addition to the intolerance of ambiguity hypothesized by Adorno and his team, Jost and colleagues (2003a) also found evidence of less integrative complexity, increased uncertainty avoidance, greater need for more cognitive closure and heightened feelings of fear and threat amongst more conservatively oriented individuals. To be sure, not all of these associations were large – over all the nine indicators examined, the mean correlation was .29; but, given that these were typically averaged over several independent samples, they were all statistically highly reliable. In sum, therefore, there is evidence that more authoritarian (in other words, more prejudiced) people do have a tendency to think in certain ways.
What about the link between authoritarianism and prejudice? As already noted, Adorno and colleagues (1950) found substantial correlations (usually greater than 0.6) between their earlier measure of outright ethnocentrism and the F-scale,
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Prejudiced Individuals 17 correlations which thus confirmed the proposed link between prejudice and personality. Subsequent investigations have borne out this relationship. For instance, in a sample of US students, Campbell and McCandless (1951) found a similar-sized correlation between authoritarianism and their own measure of xenophobia, which tapped hostility towards blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Japanese, and English people. Studies outside the USA have also found associations between authoritarianism and prejudice. Pettigrew (1958) found reliable correlations (of between 0.4 and 0.6) between the F-scale and anti-black prejudice, a finding to which I shall return later. In the Netherlands, Meleon and colleagues (1988) reported consistent and substantial correlations between authoritarianism and ethnocentrism, and similar relationships between authoritarianism, sexism and support for extreme right-wing political groups. In India, Sinha and Hassan (1975) found that religious prejudice against Muslims, caste prejudice against Harijans and sexist prejudice were all predictable from the authoritarianism of some high-caste Hindu men. Moreover, the three indices of prejudice also correlated highly amongst each other, further supporting the idea of an underly-ing prejudiced personality. Also consistent with The Authoritarian Personality are the correlations which have been observed between authoritarianism and atti-tudes towards stigmatized or deviant sub-groups. For example, Cohen and Streuning (1962), then Hanson and Blohm (1974) found that authoritarians were less sympathetic than non-authoritarians towards mentally ill people, even when, as was the case in the former study, the respondents were actually staff in psychiatric institutions. In a similar vein, attitudes towards people with AIDS may be less positive amongst authoritarians (Witt, 1989). Finally, as we will see shortly, a modern variant of the F-scale also correlates reliably with prejudice towards a variety of other outgroup targets (Altemeyer, 1988, 1996).
Despite this range of supportive evidence, research findings on the link between authoritarianism and prejudice have not been entirely unequivocal. Some of the observed correlations are not very strong, usually explaining less than half, and some-times less than a fifth, of the variance in prejudice scores. Thus, whatever the contri-bution of personality disposition to expressed prejudice may be, there are clearly other processes at work too. A second problem is that, occasionally, zero correlations have been reported between authoritarianism and outgroup rejection. One interesting example is Forbes’ (1985) study of the link between authoritarianism and intergroup attitudes in Canada. Amongst English-speaking respondents there was (as predicted) a significant correlation between authoritarianism and anti-French feeling, although it was very weak (< 0.2). However, the same group showed a negative correlation between authoritarianism and a measure of nationalism, and no correlation at all with internationalism. Even more problematic were the consistent null relationships observed amongst the francophones.1
Ironically enough, the explosion of research interest stimulated by The Authoritarian Personality quickly identified a number of rather damaging methodological and theo-retical flaws in the whole project (Brown, 1965; Christie and Jahoda, 1954; Rokeach, 1956). Since many of these criticisms are both well known and better articulated elsewhere, I shall do no more than rehearse what I see as the most damning of those early arguments, leaving for a later section a more general critique of the attempt to explain prejudice in personality terms.
At a methodological level, most of the critical attention focused on the design and validation of the F-scale (Hyman and Sheatsley, 1954; Brown, 1965). Three problems in particular came to light. The first was that Adorno and his colleagues had used rather unrepresentative samples of respondents on whom to develop and subsequently refine their questionnaires. Despite the impressive size of some of these samples – over 2,000 respondents in the development of the F-scale alone – they were drawn mainly from formal (and predominantly middle-class) organiza-tions. These, Hyman and Sheatsley (1954) suggested, might well attract a particular kind of personality type and, in any case, hardly constituted a sound empirical base from which to construct a general theory of prejudice. A second and perhaps more serious problem concerned the construction of the F-scale itself. In common with other scales devised by Adorno and colleagues, all its items were worded in such a way that agreement with them indicated an authoritarian response. The obvious drawback of this procedure, as Brown (1965) pointed out, was that authoritarian-ism so measured can easily be distinguished from a general tendency to agree with seemingly authoritative sounding statements (see also Bass, 1955). Finally, the steps taken to validate the F-scale through those in-depth clinical interviews with high and low scorers left much to be desired. Particularly worrisome was the fact that the interviewers knew in advance the score of each respondent, a fact which raised the possibility that, unconsciously or not, they could have influenced the answers they elicited. As psychology was later to discover, even the behaviour of laboratory rats can be affected when one’s research assistants are aware of the experimental hypoth-eses under test (Rosenthal, 1966).
There was other, more substantive criticism to be made of The Authoritarian Personality project. This centred on the correlations which Adorno and colleagues reported between authoritarianism and such variables as intelligence, level of educa-tion and social class, correlaeduca-tions which were observed still more strongly in later research (Christie, 1954). The theoretical significance of these correlations is that they suggest an alternative explanation for the genesis of authoritarianism. Perhaps the latter simply reflects the socialized attitudes of particular sub-groups in society and does not, as Adorno and colleagues contended, have its origins in personality dynam-ics deriving from a certain kind of family upbringing (Brown, 1965). This could explain why Mosher and Scodel (1960), when they measured the ethnocentrism of children and their mothers, and also the mothers’ attitudes towards authoritarian child-rearing practices, found a reasonable correlation between the two measures of ethnocentrism, but absolutely no association at all between the mothers’ child-rearing attitudes and their children’s prejudice levels. This strongly suggests some direct socialization of attitudes rather than an indirect shaping of a prejudiced personality by parenting style. However, as we shall see in Chapter 5, even the direct socialization model is not without its problems.
Right-wing authoritarianism: An old wine in a new bottle?
In the face of these criticisms, perhaps it was not surprising that the quest for the prejudiced personality lapsed into relative obscurity in the second and third decades after the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. It might have remained there, had it not been for the efforts of Altemeyer (1988, 1996, 1998). Like others before
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Prejudiced Individuals 19 him (for instance Lee and Warr, 1969), Altemeyer set his sights on rectifying the psychometric imperfections of the F-scale. In particular, he sought to correct its most glaring deficiency: the presence of an acquiescence response set (all the items worded in the same ‘authoritarian direction’). Over the years, Altemeyer has devel-oped a number of versions of what he calls a right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) scale, the most recent and now widely accepted of which contains thirty items balanced for the direction of their wording (Altemeyer, 1996). These items, selected from a much larger number, are intended to capture what Altemeyer sees as the three essential ingredients of the authoritarian character: submission (to authori-ties), aggression (towards deviants or ‘outsiders’), and conventionalism (adherence to orthodox moral codes). The following examples will give a flavour of the items in the scale:
Our country will be great if we honour the ways of our forefathers, do what authorities tell us to do, and get rid of the ‘rotten apples’ who are ruining everything.
A lot of our rules regarding modesty and sexual behaviour are just customs which are not necessarily any better or holier than those which other people follow. [Reverse item: in other words, this item actually measures the opposite of authoritarianism and needs to be reversed before being aggregated with the other items.]
Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fibre and traditional beliefs. (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 13)
Notice how these statements typically seek to tap two or more of the core constructs at the same time. In the first one quoted, the initial phrase links to conventionalism; in the second one, to authoritarian submission; and in the final one, to authoritarian aggression. As a result, most of the statements are quite long and express several ideas simultaneously. Not surprisingly, since they are purporting to be measuring similar constructs, some of the RWA items bear some resemblance in tone, if not in exact content, to those of the original F-scale. Gone, though, are those items with a strong psychoanalytic flavour, since, for Altemeyer (1996), one of the distinctive features – and virtues – of the RWA scale is that it is freed from the Freudian trappings of its F-scale predecessor.
The RWA scale has good psychometric properties. It has high internal reliability, reflected in the fact that all the items correlate respectably with the total score. Its test/
re-test reliability also appears to be good, typically in the 0.7–0.9 range (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 319). This is prima facie evidence that the scale is measuring a relatively stable personality trait, although, as we shall see, it is not definitive evidence of this. Finally, as evidence for its validity, the scale correlates predictably and positively with a wide range of outgroup prejudice measures, including prejudice towards ethnic minorities, homo-phobia and (negative) attitudes towards the homeless and law breakers (Altemeyer, 1996). As we have come to expect, these correlations are of ‘moderate’ magnitude (that is, 0.4–0.6), which leaves more than half of the variance in prejudice unaccounted for by the RWA scores.
Some of Altemeyer’s (1996) other claims about his version of authoritarianism are also noteworthy. Eschewing the psycho-dynamic approach of Adorno and colleagues (1950), Altemeyer argues that the origins of authoritarianism lie not in the parent–child dynamics in early childhood but in the wider social learning
experiences of the individual, particularly those leading into adolescence. Although he does not have any direct developmental evidence for this hypothesis, Altemeyer does find that high RWA scorers tend to recollect their life experiences as more narrowly conventional and more marked by strict discipline than low RWA scorers do. In other words, people learn to be authoritarian as an adaptation to social environments of particular kinds, and not just as a result of being subjected to the attentions of overbearing parents. One piece of evidence in support of this thesis is that people’s RWA scores correlate more strongly (around .70) with a scale tapping experiences with authority situations than with their parents’ RWA scores (around .40). Other evidence consistent with this social learning account is the fact that people’s RWA scores can be observed to change over their life-span. For example the experience of higher education tends to lower RWA scores, whilst parenthood seems to increase them.
Finally, Altemeyer (1996) also records that he has observed some striking cohort differences in RWA over a twenty-three-year period. Although Altemeyer interprets these fluctuations as evidence for the sensitivity of the RWA scale to detect changes in his students’ typical individual life experiences, ironically they can also be viewed as evidence against the kind of traditional personality theory that he espouses. I will return to this point in the concluding section of the chapter.
What, then, should be concluded about Altemeyer’s attempt to update and improve on the original project of locating the personality type prone to be prejudiced? At a technical level, there is no doubt that the RWA scale is superior to the F-scale. It is balanced for affirmative and negative items and it shows reasonable internal and test/
re-test reliabilities. Still, it is not without its flaws. As we saw, many of its items are double-barrelled or even treble-barrelled in form, and normally such complex formulations should be avoided because it is unclear which part of the statement the respondent is (dis)agreeing with (Robinson et al., 1991). Moreover, despite Altemeyer’s claim that the RWA measures a single construct, authoritarianism, albeit one with three sub-components (aggression, submission, conventionalism), more careful analysis suggests that these sub-scales should indeed be distinguished (Funke, 2005). Not only does a tripartite structure seem to fit the observed pattern of correlations amongst the items, but the three dimensions can be differentially related to social attitudes. Funke showed how the level of punishment proposed by partici-pants for a hypothetical offender was positively related to the aggression dimension of authoritarianism, but negatively to the conventionalism and submission dimen-sions. Moreover, the aggression and submission dimensions were strongly and nega-tively related to an ‘integration’ acculturation orientation (Berry, 1984), whilst the conventionalism dimension was unrelated to that same orientation (Funke, 2005). In short, authoritarianism may be a more complex constellation of personality factors than Altemeyer (1996) surmises.
There is a final potential criticism of the concept of right-wing authoritarianism, one which it shares with the original Authoritarian Personality idea: both deal only with one variant of authoritarianism – that siding with the political right. Could it not be that people with other political views are also authoritarian, and hence also preju-diced? This argument was first advanced by Shils (1954), and it was properly devel-oped into a more systematic theory by Rokeach (1956, 1960).
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Prejudiced Individuals 21